skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Isn't that what all large projects are doing internally? Hell, big chunks of the git chrome (things like "git am", "git request-pull", "git send-email") is precisely an attempt to write scripts to automate core parts of the kernel workflow. Github added bits of its own, like "watching" a public repository and providing a core spot for pull requests to land, with discussion and review tools. I don't understand why you're so interested in "enforcement" when projects using these tools seem to be doing just fine.

What you're saying sounds to me a lot like the stuff we heard from Java nerds in the 90's (who certainly didn't invent it, Pascal and PL/1 nuts said much of the same stuff) -- the programming environment should be designed to force the user into a particular style. Our community has, for the most part, rejected that view in favor of dynamic systems with more flexibility. Why should SCM branch management be any different?
The scam site: http://windows4pc.webs.com/

EDIT: Webs.com has just frozen it.
Yes and I hope to continue programming well into my 60s and beyond if I will be so lucky.

However I hope that by then I won't be working for a boss and stressing to meet deadlines. I hope that I will be conducting research and working with fellow hackers to seek out the next frontier of the future.

While I think the present we live in now is full of wonders, I don't get a very gratifying sense that it's going to last. It seems more to me that we're finally able to apply the things we've spent enormous amounts of time and money learning over the last thirty years -- we're not out seeking the future so much as we're claiming a stake in the present.
Patently Apple
on the other hand, i like to think of myself as "hearing endowed"
Of course, Mathematica gets it right :) As a general rule, never use == and != operators on floats or doubles.
Not to mention that they equate A-F as 10-16, when in fact it is 10-15, and the whole "ones column" goes from 0-15, not 1-16.
So many of the clients I work with in ecommerce get their knickers in a twist about profit per order, glad to see that this is getting some attention. It's also probably in the top 5 reasons why people abandon their ecommerce ideas in the first place.
True. A lot of good companies recruiting from big name colleges (IITs, NITs etc.) are wasting their time. The people from those colleges more or less end up studying for CAT and leave to study for an MBA degree within an year. Increasingly the startup founders and rockstar engineers come from the non-IIT-NIT colleges.
Yep! If businesses would worry less about the cost of providing world-class support and do a better job of testing to identify the most profitable price points then everyone wins - customers and business owner.
Well, "Deaf" isn't an attempt to be PC. There is a discrete Deaf culture which makes sense given their relative social isolation, common challenges and distinct language(s).
High-powered service-oriented software companies like Google and Amazon are great for this, where every engineer runs their own project and has vendor-client relationships with other engineers, where the vendor bills are paid by management based on client satisfaction.
Many comments expressed concern about the alleged inappropriateness
of the title. Even the no-free
lunch theorem has been invoked, and words like SVM mentioned.

However: The original title, "Neural Networks officially best at object
recognition", is much more appropriate than the current title, because
it is by far the hardest vision contest. It is nearly two
orders of magnituder larger and harder than other contests,
which is why the winner of this contest is best at object recognition.
The original title is much more accurate and should be restored.

Second, the gap between the first and the second entry is so obviously
huge (25% error vs 15% error), that it cannot be bridged with simple "feature
engineering". Neural networks win precisely because they look at the
data, and choose the best possible features. The best human feature
engineers could not come close to a relentless data-hungry algorithm.

Third, there was mention of the no-free lunch theorem and of how one
cannot tell which methods are better. That
theorem says that learning is impossible on data that has
no structure, which is true but irrelevant. What's
relevant that on the "specific" problem of object recognition
as represented by this 1-million large dataset, neural networks
are the best method.

Finally, if somebody makes SVMs deep, they will become more like neural
networks and do better. Which is the point.

This is the beginning of the neural networks revolution in computer vision.
Thanks for such an informative reply. I hope one day Argentina gets a government worthy of them :-)

I also hope to go fishing in Patagonia one day, but that's another story...

As an aside, are those wealthy families that own all the land of Spanish or Welsh origin? I've heard there are a lot of Welsh immigants in Argentina.
I totally agree with you - I really don't think that OP has reached statistical significance
People are being very selective in what they are responding to. The final words are "But large scale, high stress coding? I may have to admit that's a young man's game." High stress coding is what companies can get away with when they hire kids fresh out of college, i.e. young, stupid and inexperienced.

And before people throw a hissy fit about being called 'stupid', look back at 10 years ago and tell me you weren't stupid with regard to what you think is important now.

No one is saying you can't (or shouldn't) code in your 50s or beyond, but the older you get the more particular you get about what you work on and what your working conditions are.
Sociopaths don't care about other people. At all.
How Should Your Brand Partner With A Startup?
Thanks for the awesome opportunity to spread the word about Chic Engine!
Things I, As A Developer, Wish More Entrepreneurs Knew
Thank you for the link! Their offering looks pretty solid; they are apparently using SSDs for all disk space which is one of the first I've seen doing this while using an 'on-demand' pricing model that's competitive with Linode.

Some key things I saw when I briefly checked it out:

-Their answers [1] regarding bandwidth bursting and fair bandwidth usage / sharing policies [2] is slightly ambiguous, or worrisome at least IMO, although maybe I'm just a cynic heh.

-They do include CPU bursting [3] similar to Linode.

-No private IP addresses [4]. No mention of IPv6 either but perhaps they do support it? =(

-Their 'Features' page looks great but I can't find more specific information & details on some of the things mentioned such as:
A) US & Europe data center; is casually mentioned as being New York & Amsterdam only though.
B) The ability to upgrade a 'Droplet' VM to a dedicated instance that can use all the host resources.
C) No mention of VM resize speed / more info on the 'private network' aspects.

[1] = https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/do-you-limi...

[2] = https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/do-you-have...

[3] = https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/how-does-cp...

[4] = https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/do-you-offe...

Does anyone have any first-hand experience with DigitalOcean that could provide some insight?

I'll probably give it a whirl in the next few days as it looks to be a solid offering; would definitely be interested if anyone that may have gone with them already though!
FDA cracks down on thousands of websites for selling bad drugs
Excellent read. I've been interested in developing some sort of tool to help me select, save, and organize colors for custom palettes.

This will definitely help -- thanks!
How 'The Big Bang Theory' Sent Howard Wolowitz to Space
I might have to give this a go, given that "Computer Studies" these days doesn't seem to teach children to program any more...
Seeking Work - Remote

I am mainly a web developer in PHP/Python and a bit noobie in Rails. Can also make iOS apps.

http://adnansiddiqi.com
Why exactly do people like FeedBurner so much? What is it for that having an RSS feed on your blog doesn't do?
I exclusively use HSL notation because if you're using less functions like spin(), [de]saturate() and [lighten|darken]() it's what makes the most sense.
The short story is that hand-curation does not seem to work at a very large scale, so we need to create tools for automated discovery (e.g., search, recommendations, controlled skill vocabulary etc.) and automated but credible signals of ability and trustworthiness (e.g., feedback system, skills tests, verified identities etc.). In a nutshell, the challenge is trying to take the things Josh was doing by hand and turn them into data-driven features.

Note: I'm the staff economist at oDesk & I'm on the research/data science team.
Urban Prototyping SF - October 20
What is wrong with everyone doing well, including your peers and descendants? Why must everyone want to be the top dog forever? You are going to die. No one will buy or code their way out of that, not even Zuck or Gates
Neural Network Back-Propagation for Programmers
Dwolla is the bees' knees
This now makes me hope I get called. If so, I'm going to say that I'm from Internet Explorer support and that THEY have viruses and they need to download a program so I can remove the virus from their computer.
It's an easy way to get feed subscriber analytics and set up a podcast feed. Several big sites use Feedburner and it would seem crazy to shut it down. The landing page is a bit confusing because "Adsense for feeds" the service is still working but the blog, of the same name, was shut down.
I wouldn't classify these kinds of people as sociopaths, just opportunists.
Project Portfolio Management Software - ProjectVision
The only value I see (and why I use it), is so that I can track how many RSS readers I have.

Also interesting - RSS (for me anyways) converts really poorly. On 100,000 pageviews, I only pick up about 100 or so RSS subscribers.
Great dissection, thanks for sharing!

Similarly argued, icon fonts are cool but have x-browser rendering issues, dependence on webkit for accurate anti-aliasing (currently), require sticking to a 32x32 grid, and altogether lead to a massive headache for nimble development. In most cases, especially for new products and low traffic, it's premature optimization. Github's speakerdeck gives a great rundown of their experience:

https://speakerdeck.com/u/jonrohan/p/say-hello-to-octicons

And note, this is Github, who actually has reason to optimize for >2MM users, saying the process was is too complex and tedious.
Publishers abandon fight against Google book scanning
How to stop ear ringing
Cool, I love having stuff like this out there. It may not always be the right tool for a given problem, but sometimes it will be. I imagine I'll have cause to use it sometime this year, so thanks!

In particular, I could see this being useful in a situation where you want the validation "rule" to be readable by non-programmers (perhaps if building a system where an end-user can choose amongst a set of canned validation rules for custom fields that they can add to something-or-other). In such a case, this simple grammar is something you could display in whatever "configurator" UI the user has. In general I like stuff that both programmers and non-programmers (or just a programmer that doesn't feel like being a programmer right then) can understand.

Thanks for taking the time to post it laktek.
How is clicking a facebook like button not actively using facebook? I would think that's kind of the definition of being active (as opposed to passive).

And they don't count non-logged-in users. You have to be logged in and either visit facebook.com, or click a like button.
The speed doesn't tell us the whole story. If a chemical rocket can only practically carry enough fuel to burn a couple times on a one-way trip to Mars, while this has fuel to burn for maneuvers and a return journey, then it is a big advancement. We weren't given enough info, so it's a bit early to discount it as worthless.
The CIA and Jeff Bezos Bet on Quantum Computing
"Is your experience unusual?"

naah all my friends were chasing girls. And the girls had their own agendas I assume. Lots of sex happened then (and happens today), though there were a few people who 'went without'. But even then I assure you that was due to being unable to score, not by choice.

Arranged marriages do happen, even today. That has nothing to do with what happens when you are not married. Traditionally there was a lot of emphasis on women's virginity, as in many patriarchical societies so it was a rewarding strategy (in the game theory sense) for women to pretend that they were/are 'pure' before marriage. With the onset of modernization and urbanization, this is all honored in the breach, in the cities at least.

"I know that in a lot of conservative societies (like some of the Arab countries, particularly in the Gulf) men & women are not supposed to have relationships before marriage"

'supposed to' being the operative word, even in Islamic countries. Teenagers are horny everywhere in the world, and the rest is just negotiation and risk taking ;)
Linus doesn't want all of your personal history. So he's okay with you rebasing your 15 commits that fixed bug X into one "fix for bug X," but never should anyone rebase someone else's history.
Is this an attempt to karma-whore, or did you just not understand how to properly create a poll?
By grandparents were busting their hump building new businesses after fleeing genocide in their home country,
I wouldn't trade my life for theirs.
Matches my experience. Unless you're working on cutting edge stuff chances are they you aren't writing anything _that_ complicated - and that the tricky bit of your job is understanding the requirements, not working out what combination of if statements/objects/functions is most useful for writing something that fulfils them.
Keep your eye for TI tech days. They have them in most major cities. Its a series of classes layered with tons of TI advertising. I usually walk out of them learning something.

The reason I bring them up is they usually give out 95% off anything under $500 coupons from their estore. I picked up a nice DSP dev board with one of them not too long ago.
Can you expand on the resiliency of cloudfront? We've had great success after switching to it for hosting of map tiles, but possibly haven't pushed it hard enough yet. (I pushed it hard, but defining "enough" is very, very tricky)

Cloudfront in front of S3 isn't particularly expensive. Invalidations aside they're billed the same way and you're paying less per bit|request.

Invalidations, however, are a bitch. We've had a couple of times that we put up a map, found a problem with it, then decided to wait out the CF cache rather than pay for a bajillion invalidations.
I'm also a few... and about 10,000 of twitters MAUs.
Sorry, but any new product rollout these days that is based on Flash is probably not a good bet.

How is this any different than already existing Flash-based video?
While I find this somewhat fascinating, I think this kind of analysis would be similar to trying to figure out how to make great food by examining the molecular contents of the final product.
Like the Viking probes, Curiosity uses the heat from natural decay, not fission. It's a much more foolproof system than a reactor, but it only generates 110W, meaning it needs batteries to handle bursts of demand over 110W.
As it hasn't been mentioned yet, Amazon released EBS Optimized and Provisioned IOPS a few months ago that vastly improves EBS throughput.

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/08/fast-forward-provisioned-...
It is deceiving when using it as a metric to sell more ads. Yes, people may be liking stuff, but you can like thousands of things a day and not even open the facebook page, thus not seeing any ads. If they were able to break down like clicks based on whether somebody is on the site or not, that would be a more honest approach (not sure if they do this or not already) as you can see if marketing dollars spent there would be worth it. If many people are liking stuff that is related to your product/market but never go to Facebook.com to see ads, then why waste the money?
Disclosure: IANAL.

Adding to John's message above:

>> Go back to the employment agreement you signed, read it.

Not just read it but make sure to read it very carefully. There are terms frequently used in such contracts that look like normal English (or other language) words but may have very well-defined and specific legal meaning. Examples would include "work", "inventions", "work for hire", etc. Generally you can find definitions of these online, including in Wikipedia, and also sometimes in the contract itself.

The contracts also often have a place for "excepted works / inventions" where you can write things that you would want to exclude from the contract. Be careful again of the precise contract though as:

1. The exceptions are generally intended for work you did "prior" to employment by the company. Anything you do after joining may not be covered in this form.

2. As John noted, you may still have a requirement to disclose any excepted work you do within prescribed time limits to the employer.

3. You may have non-compete clauses which prevent you from working on things related to the employers line (or anticipated line) of business. This bears another example where people often misinterpret -- They claim for example that their side project is on end-consumer software application while the company products are enterprise related [Hint: Do not go by your or normal language definition of "related". As far as legal world is concerned, "software" may be just one category. A good check, though probably not correct, would be to see which line of businesses the employer's trademarks are registered for.]

To summarize:

1. As John said, better to discuss with a lawyer.

2. Even with '1' above, go read a book or two. E.g.: "www.amazon.com/Intellectual-Property-Open-Source-Protecting/dp/0596517963/"

3. Do not blindly fill the excepted works/inventions form. It by itself may not save you. You may need a separate agreement in writing stating something like "Employer has no interest in your side project and does not mind you working on it on the sides". Make sure also that your side project is well defined in this new contract -- My guess is that over including or under including would not be good ideas.

4. There have been previous discussions on HN. I would have found some for you but need to rush right now.

Disclosure: IANAL.
I'm far from an Apple fanboy, have an Android phone, but... the best investment I've ever made is an extra iPad for my kid.

There's sooo much good stuff for the little ones on the iPad that's really educational. Android is simply lacking in that respect (for now).

Case in point, I downloaded some apps, and without any intervention on my part she taught herself how to write letters (little skywriter), do simple math (monkey school math), work with sets (firstapp.com peeps), draw lovely artwork with commentary (doodlecast), learn about physics (amazing alex) etc etc.

Nothing better than having her come over to me and "explain" how things work.

If you think an iPad is going overboard in terms of expenses, a lot of this stuff works on the iTouch as well.
Why do you think that Flash is probably not a good bet?
A large number of founders have done this (in the hundreds now) and I'm not aware of anyone having a problem with it, even with people specifically stating what they were doing in the US (people however have had problems when they've described YC as an "educational program").

Moreover the visa waiver is used extensively by technology companies, investment banks and consultancies when having foreign employees work out of their US offices for short periods (upto several months).

Is it a legally airtight option ? - no.
Is it in practice what everyone uses ? - yes.
I've started using HSL too. Paul Irish is right, once you start using it, it's really easy to grasp and use on the fly.

See:

http://mothereffinghsl.com/
The most efficient machines use knowledge of the past to predict the future
Re #2, automatic, optimal feature selection is one of the touted advantages of neural networks. (usually with the caveat that it doesn't work so well in practice, however).
Neat! Both my daughters, four and six, have been asking me when they can program like daddy :).

The six-year-old can read, but the four-year-old cannot. I'm looking forward to trying this later with the older daughter.
> we expect Tesla to become cash flow positive at the end of next month.

Never in my wildest dreams did I expect that to become a reality. We truly live in amazing times.
> For sovereign countries, unfortunately, there is no such procedure.

Poor sovereign countries... Instead of having their assets wiped out and possibly facing years of payments (even if reduced), they have to deal with unbearable consequences, like a lot of finger waving and maybe a boat detained on request of someone not willing to finance political careers half way around the world. Dreadful. It may even come to the point that creditors will find some of those countries not trustworthy in the future and won't lend their governments more money.
I worry you may have taken a biased look at "Unbiased Look at Dataset Bias".
Hopefully none of them (at least none that use floating point arithmetic). When you convert the equation to the exponent notation you get this:

(1.2x2^-2) - (1.6x2^-3) = (1.6x2^-3) - (1.6x2^-4)

which is pretty clearly false. http://www.h-schmidt.net/FloatConverter/IEEE754.html has a pretty nice conversion tool, if you're curious.
I was just talking about this with my wife.

We have a regular housekeeper that comes just twice a month but it would be great -- especially once we have kids -- to be able to get an on-demand maid the morning after a dinner party or a kids sleepover or whatever.

We love Uber, and I'd love to try this out.
The title has changes at least twice, confusing discussion. Can we have a title history on HN posts? Mutable state stinks.
The storage format is proprietary and some kind of obfuscation of the image data is done.

According to the ToS, you don't own a license to the comics, so you can't export them, or even hold onto the comics if comiXology disappears.
How to Be Happier at Work
I manage a website for a small business that doesn't want or warrant a full integrated blog engine. Feedburner allows the business owners to write news/announcements on blogger.com and display them on the front page of their website with just a single line of js. This puts authentication and security all on Google instead of the website and still provides a simple WYSIWYG interface for easy tech-illiterate updating.
Excited for ScheduleMAX.com to be featured among these other amazing startups! Check us out if your biz could use online scheduling.
Some SQL implementations seem to. In Postgres:

test=# select (0.3 - 0.2) - 0.1;
?column?
----------
0.0
(1 row)

(Ruby gives me -2.77555756156289e-17)
git is so overly complex (Coming from svn).
If the main motivator here is price (ability to charge per hour vs per month), and EC2 is so much more expensive than a VPS provider, have you done the math to see if buying a couple extra VPS's for the month would not break even or be cheaper overall? Linode is kind of pricey compared to other VPS providers.

The larger your site gets the less you're going to need to rely on "hourly" scaling (as your traffic models also become more predictable). There's also the question of uptime, which we've all seen is not a guarantee from just using Amazon.
If you really wanted to mess with them, you could tell them you were using an old version of Lindows (now Linspire...)
It was some good bonding/educational time. She spent an hour sat on my knee playing around with this.
Yes, kill it.

If there is a market, somebody else will rise from the ashes.
She is too young I suppose, but this tool has been getting some exposure recently (create games on the PC for other platforms, incl. iOS and Android)

http://gamesalad.com/